Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts

Re:Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Mi... by cs02rm0 on Friday June 22, 2018 @04:52AM (#17372504)

I'm not quite sure why this is downvoted, although I understand the nuance, it seems an interesting and related point.

Out of interest, are there open source licenses that prevent use in military projects? ISTR reading something recently about it being legally questionable to discriminate between who can accept a license, but that was in the context of allowing open source for non-commercial purposes.

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Re:Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Mi... by palotasb on Friday June 22, 2018 @05:03AM (#17372550)

I don't think the idea of free software and banning specific uses is compatible. OSI also says that they require no such discrimination: https://opensource.org/osd (points 5, 6)

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Re:Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Mi... by robin_reala on Friday June 22, 2018 @04:54AM (#17372512)

Crockford’s original JSON licence banned the use of the technology for evil, but IBM’s lawyers knew that a bunch of their projects couldn’t be guaranteed to be 100% evil-free and negotiated an exemption.

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Re:Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Mi... by hsivonen on Friday June 22, 2018 @04:59AM (#17372535)

By definition, a license that has Field of Use restrictions is not an Open Source license.

Creative Commons NonCommercial licenses, for example, are neither Open Source nor Free Software licenses.

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Re:Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Mi... by s73v3r_ on Friday June 22, 2018 @01:15PM (#17375648)

I imagine that someone who wants to prevent use of their work by the military would not be concerned over whether something is technically not open source or not.

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Re:Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Mi... by r3bl on Friday June 22, 2018 @05:25AM (#17372638)

> Out of interest, are there open source licenses that prevent use in military projects?

This question is an oxymoron.

Both the definition of open source (by the Open Source Initiative) and the definition of free software (by the Free Software Foundation) explicitly forbid discriminating against any person or a group of people for software to be considered as open source / free software.

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